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Butter Chicken Madness

Creamy, deliscious spicy flavorful butter chicken. This was everything my cuisine turned out not to be the first time I made it. I followed my recipe, which came from eCurry, step by step however some parts weren’t clear in the directions. For example, the blogger states to just add salt. How much salt am I supposed to know how to put? I also managed to put more lemon juice than suggested, by accident of course, so my first trial was a tad bit too lemony. I had a lot of difficulty looking for some of the ingredients to make the butter chicken. Going from Lucky to Safeway and finally Trader Joes I couldn’t find black cardamoms or dried fenugreek leaves. I suddenly remembered that there was a Middle Eastern market not to far from my house. I quickly jumped in to my car and rushed over to the market. Upon arriving there I found that they also didnt have the black cardamoms I was looking for but they did sell the green ones. This was good enough for me and I figured skipping one little ingredient would affect the taste too much. With all my ingredients in hand I went home and was eager to begin cooking.

Ingredients:

Ingredients: (serves 4-6)1. 2 lbs chicken , washed, patted dry and cut into small pieces – (feel free to use chicken with or without bones, chicken thighs or a combination of breast and thighs)

I began my cuisine by prepping my chicken, which pretty much meant washing it and cutting it into small pieces. The directions weren’t too clear on how small to cut the chicken but since I saw pictures and have had butter chicken before I assumed they weren’t supposed to be too small.My biggest difficulty with cutting the chicken was that I didn’t have the right knife that would cut through the chicken smoothly. I felt like I almost cut my hand several times because the chicken was too slippery and the knife wasn’t sharp enough to cut it.

After washing and cutting my chicken into somewhat of cube shapes, i prepared the yogurt and mixed in the chili powder, salt, ginger-garlic paste, lemon, and garam masala. As I added this mixture to the chicken, I read through the instructions and realized I had to leave this in the fridge for 3 hours or more! I couldn’t believe that I missed that part of the instructions when I started. Considering the fact that I started cooking at around 8pm, I felt that I was never going to finish making this meal, so I marinated the chicken for two hours instead, feeling that it would be enough.

While this marinated I prepared the second half of the cuisine, which included the tomato puree boiled with cinammon sticks green cardamoms, and cloves

Most importantly I had to cut the green chills and add it to the tomato puree mixture to give it that extra kick. One thing I found difficult during this part was that in the directions, eCurry didn’t really inform on how to cut the green chilis. This lead me to just assume to leave the chills slit the long way instead of being finely chopped.

After cooking the chicken and bringing the tomato puree to a boiling point I was able to add the chicken to it and finally bring the cooking to an end. While there were no directions on how to make rice, I decided to just make my own recipe which was simply two cups of rice, three and a half cups of water, a table spoon of butter, salt and rice seasoning.

Throughout this experience I have learned that I can learn how to cook something very difficult and not native to me, however I completely managed to fail at making the rice. One might question how someone fails at making the easiest side dish in the world. The answer is very simple, I was in a rush to finish the meal that I cooked the rice on high heat which burned it. As for the butter chicken, it turned out a success after the second time by minimizing the amount of lemon juice I put and adding some salt to taste. Since there was enough for my family at home they decided to give it a try. One of my sisters said it was very nasty ad just ate the rice, my father, who always tries to be supportive to me it was good and my mother didn’t even give me any feedback, so I took her silence as a positive feedback until she decides to comment on the butter chicken. The funniest reaction of all was from my youngest sister. We decided to take a picture to show how much we enjoyed the meal. While my plate is empty because I enjoyed what I considered successful butter chicken, my sister pretend to enjoy it in the picture. The second we were done she spit it out and squinted her face saying, “I’m sorry Hana I love your cooking but I cant eat this. It has too much tomato sauce and I just don’t like it!” My mother also critiqued me and stated that the lemon was too strong and there was too much tomato sauce with a very strong tangy taste.